


get to sleep tonight

by kickedshins



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canon Compliant, Longing, M/M, Post-Canon, Richard Gansey III-centric, Underage Drinking, but not at all to the point of drunkenness everything is very consensual, implied sarchengseyish ending, theyre in love its fine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 19:47:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21934177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kickedshins/pseuds/kickedshins
Summary: It isn’t like Adam, because he doesn’t feel as guilty, and it isn’t like Blue, because he doesn’t feel on fire. But Henry’s always been different than other people, and Gansey doesn’t know why he thought that kissing him would be at all the same. Kissing Henry is diving deep into a pool, being watched as he swims laps, holding his breath for as long as he can bear just to reassure himself that his lungs can burn with as much of a smoldering ache as anyone else’s.orGansey freaks out about life, death, and having just a little too much love in his heart (for Blue Sargent and more).
Relationships: Henry Cheng/Richard Gansey III
Comments: 10
Kudos: 47





	get to sleep tonight

**Author's Note:**

> oh my gd this is the most dramatically written thing i've ever made in my life please enjoy i just love these guys very strongly

It happens when he’s fighting with Blue.

He does that more often than he’d like. And it’s not his fault—never his fault—rarely his fault—it’s sometimes his fault, but it’s typically hers. That’s what Ronan says, at least, but Ronan seems to kind of like when it’s Blue’s fault, so that’s confusing, and Gansey doesn’t have time to deal with the fact that people have got layers and feelings and a little bit of a mean streak and he doesn’t have time to think about why he loves them despite that. Because of that.

And Adam isn’t any help, because Adam is Adam and Adam is a little jealous and there’s this undercurrent of  _ I could have done better  _ except that he  _ couldn’t  _ have because that didn’t work out, did it? Did it? It didn’t. Gansey doesn’t have  _ time  _ for this. He can’t allot resources to being petty. It doesn’t fit in his planner, handwriting half-cramped and half-sprawling. Henrietta in a leatherbound book.

She breaks up with him this time. This is the first time the two of them will break up; it will not be the last. They always get back together in the end. They’re two magnets stuck in a maze and the boundaries are teenagerhood and issues of upbringing and  _ Jesus, Gansey, it’s fucking sarcasm, okay? _

He’s not sure what he did wrong. He feels like he’s drowning. He opens his dictionary to the C pages and runs his finger over the leaf-thin pages to find  _ codependence _ .

Gansey doesn’t hate his phone like Ronan does, and he doesn’t have a complex like Adam does, and he just simply isn’t Blue, and there’s something else that should belong in that box set, but he can’t put a finger on it right now, so instead, he puts his finger on the call button of his cellphone.

“Ganseyboy!”

“Hello,” he says, and he hears himself collapse as he says it.

“ _ Ganseyboy _ ,” comes Henry’s voice again, insistent. Asking a question in a word.

“I died,” he says. As if that’s the root of his issues.

And maybe it is, because it’s different now that he knows he loves Blue and now that Blue knows that she loves him and there’s this wonderful thing about kissing, which is that it absolutely never gets old. He shivers thinking about her lips against his neck, jaw, mouth, telling him that she’s willing to be there for him if he’s willing to be there for her. 

“You did die,” Henry affirms. “I was there. I cried.” He says it shamelessly, the way that Ronan might say  _ going to church _ , or Adam might say  _ hands and eyes _ , now that those three words mean nothing of importance to him.

“You cried?” This is very important to Gansey, and he’s not sure why. He thinks of a summer day, of Ronan in a muscle tee, of Adam in shorts. He thinks of Blue cutting her hair without a mirror in the middle of an open field, and he thinks of the mosquito that landed on her shoulder, and how he worried it might be a bee.

“‘Course I cried. You’re the only thing standing in between me and Ronan Lynch’s fist cracking the hell out of my very delicate bone structure.”

Gansey frowns. He doesn’t think that that’s the real reason. “Thank you,” he says. It doesn’t feel an appropriate response by any stretch of the imagination, but for the life of him, he couldn’t dream up what one might be.

Henry laughs. “You’re very welcome. Any reason why you’re calling me to tell me you died? Unless you did it again, in which case, wow.”

That’s it. That’s it. That’s what this all is, and Gansey didn’t even realize until now. He sinks down on the edge of his bed, delighting in the way the springs creak underneath him, proof that not everything in his life is perfect. 

Ronan’s out, of course, because Ronan’s always out. At Adam’s. At the Barns. Away from Monmouth and its ever-unused guest room with sheets just a thread too wrinkled to be fresh. Away from Gansey and Blue and a symphony of sounds, because that’s what Blue does best. Draw Gansey out of his silence. She puts him to bed and she wakes him up and she makes him speak and he  _ loves  _ her. He loves her so much that his toes curl.

“I didn’t,” Gansey says, a beat too late for it to be perfectly natural. Some small part of his brain yells at him for not being quick on the uptake, for not being able to fill in the silence well enough, for not commanding the room, though the room’s only got one person in it. Henry’s far away. Vancouver House, probably. Or wherever else Henry Cheng might find himself at nine on a Friday night. “Die again, that is.”

“Didn’t think so. You get this sort of quality to your voice when you’re revived. It’s this, uh, kind of sexy dryness.”

Gansey says, “Where are you right now?” Because he’s curious, and because he can’t really wrap his mind around what  _ sexy dryness  _ might mean, and he thinks that Blue would laugh if she heard Henry saying that, and then she would kiss Gansey right below the line his collar cuts across his chest.

“Nowhere,” Henry says enigmatically.  _ Assistance needed in the feminine hygiene aisle _ , the supermarket speaker system blares. “The supermarket,” Henry says. Enigmatically.

“Snacks?” Gansey knows the answer.

“And drinks.”

“For you?”

“And others.”

“Tonight?”

There’s a pause, and for a moment, Gansey’s worried that Henry hung up, though logically he knows that Henry hasn’t hung up, because he can hear bad 2000s pop and breathing through the phone.

“If you want,” Henry offers, playing at aloof. Gansey knows faux-aloof a little too well to have it spun back at him, but he also knows politeness, so he shrugs, even though Henry can’t see him.

“I’d like that,” he says. Softer than he’d wanted. 

Sometimes, it’s very hard to be the Gansey he wants to be around Henry.

“It’s not going to be a party,” Henry warns.

“Thank you,” Gansey says again. And he uses it wrong again, but maybe he uses it right, because when Henry says  _ you’re welcome _ , Gansey sort of gets what  _ sexy dryness  _ means, and thinks that maybe he’d like to do a little further research into the topic.

Henry hangs up, and Gansey thinks of Blue Sargent’s lips on his and her hands on his back and the way his back feels pressed against a door and he loves her so much and he’s going a little crazy and the walls feel a little closer and he stands up.

He puts on his glasses; he doesn’t remember taking them off. He doesn’t remember the fight with Blue. He thinks about texting Adam for advice, but only for a second.

Gansey changes his shirt twice before leaving, and is halfway buckled into the front seat of the eco-friendly Pig when he realizes that he has absolutely no idea where and when he’s meeting Henry. He checks his phone.

_ ur place _ , it says.  _ nine fourty 3 _

**Why not yours?** Gansey asks.  **It’s your party, after all** .

_ not a party _ , Henry reminds him, as if he needed the reminding.

_ … my mother is home,  _ Henry adds, which could easily be a lie.

**Ah**

It’s a little past nine thirty. He brings himself back inside and doesn’t know where to wait. In the hallway? Or in his room? Does he slide the lock closed? Does he prop the door open? Logistics are a tricky thing, but part of him realizes that it doesn’t actually matter, and that Henry will be fine with whatever the setup, because Henry will see through the setup, and at that point the doorbell is buzzing obnoxiously and Henry is stepping through the unlocked door.

“Hello,” Gansey says.

“Is  _ hey  _ in your vocabulary?” Henry presses a Mike’s Hard Lemonade into Gansey’s hand.

Gansey weighs this question for a moment longer than Henry was intending and comes up with no answer. He unscrews the top of the bottle and drinks while closing the door and locking it behind Henry. Ronan won’t be coming home tonight. Ronan barely ever comes home at night.

“The house feels lonely,” Gansey says, shifting his weight.

“Without Ronan?”

“No,” Gansey says, and he wants to say more, but he isn’t really sure what else to add. It’s only ever been Gansey and Ronan and that unused third room, except for that he and Blue slept together there, once, because he felt strange about doing it in his own bed, as if touching her skin was somehow more a declaration of love than a deadly kiss.

“This is my first time here,” Henry declares, throwing his arms out wide. The fabric of his T-shirt stretches across his chest. 

Blue in a cocktail dress at an event for his mother. Blue winding him down into the mattress and losing herself in the way he lost himself. Blue shoving a crown off his head and letting it clatter unceremoniously to the ground. 

Henry’s got a crown of his own, maybe, and perhaps that’s a painfully overt way to think about raven boys, but Henry’s a raven boy, and Gansey’s a raven boy, and Adam and Ronan always sort of floated on the outskirts. They’re more AdamandRonan boys. And Henry knows royalty, respects royalty, flips royalty the bird. No pun intended.

“It’s kind of a shithole,” Henry continues with a grin. Gansey sort of wants to slap him, but in the way that Ronan always sort of wants to throw Blue out the window of the Pig. Except that it’s not that feeling at all, because Blue and Ronan are twins clamoring for more attention than the other gets, and Henry and Gansey are… not that. Not that at all. He isn’t sure how to describe it, but… not that. He’s good with not that.

“A little, sure,” Gansey concedes. “But it’s very wonderful, too.”

Henry says, “Okay,” and drinks his whole drink. And then he says, “How fucked up are you looking to get tonight?”

“Blue and I separated,” Gansey says, like they got a divorce, and like that’s an adequate answer to Henry’s question.

Henry winces. “Oof. Ganseyboy. That’s why you were all…”

“That’s why I was all,” Gansey agrees. He’s not really sure what the etiquette is for asking for a brain-numbing night, but he doesn’t have to worry about that—he rarely has to worry about anything with Henry—because there’s suddenly a bottle of vodka and a variety of flavored sodas sitting on the key table.

“Oh! Would you like a place to sit?” Gansey offers a few minutes too late. Henry has a knack for undoing all of Gansey’s training. Not unlike Blue.

“Sure thing. Your room?”

That feels like a very bad idea, or maybe a very good idea, but Gansey isn’t drunk yet, and he still cares about the difference, and he cares about the fact that he can’t figure out the difference, and suddenly Henry’s cross-legged on his bed, head back and eyes screwed as he swigs from the bottle.

“Ew,” he says, not sounding like what a raven boy or a Henry Cheng should sound like.

“To liver issues,” Gansey says, taking the bottle and repeating the motion. It burns pleasantly. He chases it down with a small (almost mousy) sip of cherry-vanilla Coke, and regrets that immediately, because cherry-vanilla Coke is absolutely disgusting.

He thinks, unbidden, of Joseph Kavinsky, and then he regrets that, too, because Joseph Kavinsky is absolutely disgusting. Panning out, he realizes that he’s not thinking of Kavinsky. He’s thinking of that one night, with fire and drugs and too many cars for his liking and Ronan, animalistic. No Adam and no Blue and no—

Someone else. No Henry, of course, because Henry wasn’t, well, very important to Gansey at that time. But there was no— The name falls from his grasp the closer he gets to it.

There were no limits. There was open road and broken bottles and explosives and Gansey rolling up his sleeve to form his hand into a fist. He might have used it. He probably would have used it.

A small bedroom with beige walls and an unwashed old uniform shirt thrown over the back of a chair is freedom but better. Freedom without the strings attached. No limits, really, except for four walls, because right now, it feels like not much will travel beyond them. Like not much really matters beyond them.

Gansey takes another drink, and then another, and he feels it all slip away. His shoulders go first—they relax, slipping down and forwards. His spine is quick to follow, and a pillow feels more supportive than the wooden slating of a chair against his lower back. Next, his legs uncross, and his arms take up a little more space, and he feels like Ronan all over again, and maybe it’s the parts of Ronan that make up Gansey-after-death and maybe it’s the parts of Gansey that have always been Gansey-but-hidden, and maybe Gansey-after-death is just a reconciliation of reality with Gansey-but-hidden.

And then Henry’s dragging his fingers up Gansey’s bare arm, short sleeves everpresent in the Henrietta heat, and Gansey-but-hidden is just Gansey.

A boy. He’s still a teenager. He has a flash of a thought of how he might look in a leather jacket, and he laughs boisterously.

“Are you alright?” Henry asks amusedly.

“Henry,” Gansey says. “I really have not felt better in a long time.”

“Lightweight,” Henry mumbles, but Gansey catches it, because Henry’s not great at keeping his voice low, and the room is small, and Gansey is barely a lightweight and he’s far from drunk, but it’s just that he’s earnest to a fault once Gansey-but-hidden comes out to play. He throws a shoulder playfully at Henry. He doesn’t think he’s ever really thrown a shoulder playfully at someone outside of his short-lived stint on the crew team, and that was just because everyone else was doing it.

It took him an embarrassingly long time to be comfortable with doing anything more than kissing Blue in this room. He’s just always felt a little bit like it’s his temple, like Monmouth is a Jerusalem in its own right. The spare room was not included in that. The spare room has always been a little too pagan for Gansey, registered Republican, to include in that. 

It took him an embarrassingly long time to be comfortable, but Blue respected that, and she understood that, and those are two different things, because Blue respects his wish to pay for all their dates but can’t bring herself to understand it, and she understands why he is who he is and she  _ usually  _ respects it but last week was different and now Gansey’s lying in bed with Henry instead of her and he feels like he’s making offerings at a different altar.

Jesus. It’s just drinks and bare skin.

Something feels very off. He looks down to see a pair of loafers and a pair of sneakers. “Shoes off,” he tells Henry, who complies, kicking them across the room to bounce off the bedroom door with a definitive  _ clunk _ . Gansey follows suit, letting them fly over the edge of the bed with reckless abandon.

He sits up a little straighter to down some more alcohol. He feels like he’s done the arduous duty of peeling away Gansey-in-public, except that Henry’s never really been fooled by Gansey-in-public, so it doesn’t bother him the way that it bothers Blue (because Blue doesn’t want to face the fact that there exists a Blue-in-public), and it doesn’t bother him in the way that it bothers Adam (because Adam and Gansey are the same side of two different coins), and it doesn’t bother him in the way that it bothers Ronan (because Ronan-in-public and Ronan-but-hidden blurred together a little too closely for Gansey’s upbringing’s comfort).

“Save some for me,” Henry jests, and Gansey’s surprised to see that he’s drank a lot more than he should have. To be fair, he shouldn’t have had any in the first place, because the rules of the game shift when he’s under the influence and out of the public eye. 

He hands the bottle to Henry and waits. For the alcohol to set in, though he knows it’ll take a bit for that to happen. 

Silence, Gansey knows, never stays silent for long. It yearns to be filled, just like Gansey yearns for truth. So after a few seconds of dead air, Henry says, softly, “Do you want to talk about it?”  
“Truth be told, there isn’t much to talk about.”  
“Hit me anyway, Ganseyboy. Verbally.”

“I got it, thanks.”

“Just checking.” Henry shifts himself so that he’s on his side, staring up at Gansey intently, head resting atop his palm. It’s a fervency that makes Gansey’s heart flutter. Even after two years and change with Adam and Ronan and then with Blue, he’s still a little uncomfortable with being looked at like he’s being seen more than just being looked at.

“We separated,” Gansey starts.

“I see. She dumped you?”

Gansey frowns, feeling slightly put out. He tucks his glasses into the front pocket of his shirt. It’s not that she didn’t dump him. It’s just that he doesn’t want to verbalize it, because in his experience, his words have power, and his power is creation and control, and he’s still sort of hoping he can will his way out of this. Tentatively, as if he’s testing the waters, as if he’s trying to see the ripple effect that this stone’s throw will have, Gansey says, “Yes.”

Henry tips the last dregs of the liquor down his throat. Some of it spills from his mouth onto the pillowcase, and Gansey wrinkles his nose involuntarily. 

“Her loss, Ganseyboy. Why’d she do it?”

“I think she… wanted something more.”

“Than her true love?”

Gansey sighs exasperatedly and doesn’t worry what Henry will think of it. “That’s not what I mean, exactly. I think she wanted something more than, you know,  _ this _ .” He holds out his soft hands as if they’re shackled in bracelets; he glares, incendiary, at his chinos; he tugs at his shirt. His glasses fall onto the sheets and Henry sticks them on the bedside table without looking away from Gansey’s furrowed brow.

Words, unscripted. Those are difficult.

Henry seems to accept this as an answer. Gansey’s pretty sure he gets it. “So what now?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Gansey answers, tacking on the latter three words as a last-ditch effort to hang onto his crown, but a throne doesn’t fit the decor of a Monmouth bedroom, and besides, it wouldn’t be able to fit in the tiny space either way.

“You still love her,” Henry states.

“Of course.” That’s a fact, not a declaration.

“And she still loves you.”

Gansey doesn’t answer that one. He knows she loves Gansey-but-hidden. He knows she hates Gansey-in-public. He knows she sees the black and the white of the world and finds it a little tricky to reconcile with Gansey, just Gansey, outside of the context of shame and a public face and raven boy royalty. She’s never been afraid to jump above carrying capacity; Gansey’s still trying to figure out where, exactly, his asymptote lies.

“She still loves you,” Henry repeats, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Maybe it is.

“She still loves me,” Gansey echoes. The room feels lighter by a shade. He wraps his fingers around Henry’s wrist just to feel something solid. Gansey is alive, and he is not going to die again for a long time, and Blue Sargent loves him, and Henry Cheng has a slender wrist, and these are facts, every single one of them.

“So what now?” Henry asks again.

“What now?” Gansey phrases it owlishly, as if there’s nothing to be done now. Blue loves him. He can wait. He is patient; he was made to be patient and to get what he wanted in the end.

“Well, you getting back out into the field or what, Dickman?”

This is not an option Gansey had even thought about entertaining. He and Blue are cosmically bound, or at the very least a murder case in a different picture frame, and cosmic bindings don’t really need to be knotted. It complicates things in mildly painful Adam-shaped ways. “I hadn’t really thought about it, to be honest,” Gansey says. He unbuttons the very top button of his shirt.

“She probably has. She’s too cute to let you be the only person she ever kisses.”

Something about that feels wrong, because he’s pretty sure he remembers Blue whispering a confession of a kiss with a corpse into his ear, but that was probably a dream. She knows much better than to hang around the dead. He wishes he could say the same of his formerly Glendower-obsessed self.

“She wouldn’t want to hear you say that about her.”

Henry shrugs, or gives the best approximation of a shrug that he can muster from his odd position. “It’s true, though,” he says unapologetically.

Which. Yes, is fair. “I don’t know where I’d start,” Gansey admits, though the admission feels less confessional in nature and more confirmational. 

“Have you ever kissed a girl other than her?”

“Yes.”

“Outside of your mother and Helen.”

“ _ Yes, _ Henry Cheng, I have.”

“Ooo. Double-naming me. Touchy!”

At that, Gansey realizes that his hand is still pressed against Henry’s pulse point, that if he tries very hard, he can feel his heartbeat underneath his fingertips.

“I kissed a girl for the first time when I was eleven, actually.” Gansey’s voice is the closest thing to petulant that he’s let it be for a very long time.

“I am begging you to tell me the story,” Henry says with a peculiar flatness that feels vaguely like an emulation of someone. Of Gansey when he’s not Gansey.

“It was almost exactly a year after I’d died. For the first time.” The peculiarity of being on his third life will never escape Gansey. He is privileged in many more ways than one. “At one of my mother’s events. They all sort of blur together beyond that one, you know?”

Henry chuckles bitterly. The sound feels louder than it probably should. “Oh, I know.”

“It was really hot out. I stood inside for a bit, which was fine, because the majority of people were inside. I wasn’t being antisocial or anything. One of her coworkers’ daughter had been sort of trailing me the whole time, which I didn’t notice until well after the fact. Or, actually, I didn’t notice until Helen told me.”

“Ah, Helen.”

“Do not talk about my sister in any sort of way,” Gansey demands, thinking of Orla and her orange bikini, running a hand through his hair, letting it get messier than it should be.

Henry mimes zipping his lips. He lets his arm give out from underneath himself, head falling a dramatic three inches to the mattress. He does not wrench his wrist from Gansey’s grasp.

Gansey moves his thumb back and forth over Henry’s skin as he continues. “So I offered to get her a cup of lemonade, because what else would I do? And she said that I could get her something better, and I asked what that might be—”

“Verbatim?”

“Get a grip, Cheng.”

“Last naming me! Oh, we’re really in it now.”

“And I asked what that might be, and she closed her eyes and sort of puffed out her cheeks, like a fish, you know? I had no idea what she was doing, because it’s not every day that girls transform into pufferfish right before your eyes.”

“Maybe in  _ your  _ world,” Henry mumbles. It’s stupid enough to make Gansey snort, and he’s under the influence of enough alcohol (or maybe just under the influence of Henry) that he doesn’t cover up the noise.

“I think I took too long to decide what to do about it, because she made up my mind for me. She gave me the tamest peck of all time right on my closed mouth. I felt like I was going to throw up for about an hour afterward.”

“ _ Jeeesus _ Christ,” Henry says, exactly how Ronan wouldn’t say it.

“I still see her sometimes,” Gansey continues, not really knowing why. His neck feels hot. “At events and the like.”

“Kissed her since?”

“I have not, no. I don’t think I’d want to.”

Henry sighs. “So, Blue and a literal child. Glad to know you’ve only had experience kissing people of the same height. Anyone over five feet on your body count list?”

Gansey feels like he should not be talking about this if he loves Blue so much. “Blue’s five even,” he defends.  
“I know,” Henry says. Gansey, for some reason, isn’t at all surprised to realize that he’s being completely earnest. And that makes sense.

“And besides that, I had a middle school girlfriend, I think, though I’m still not entirely sure, and I kissed a girl in England, but it was very awkward, and it was raining a little too hard for it to be enjoyable. I just haven’t had much luck with the whole situation.”

“You want practice?” Henry offers boisterously, self-assuredly, and Gansey would have laughed if it wasn’t painfully clear that Henry still hadn’t slipped out of the skin of Henry-in-public.

Unbidden, Gansey admits, “I did that once, too. And that wasn’t… well, it wasn’t half bad.”

“Oh, well, you  _ have  _ to tell me  _ everything  _ about  _ this _ .”

He’s not sure he can. He thinks of a cool summer breeze and water around his ankles and Adam’s hand pressed to the back of his head and how he knows neither of them will ever tell Ronan or Blue, and he thinks that Henry is an exception to the rule most of the time, but no one is above the law, not fully, so Gansey keeps his mouth closed.

And he thinks of something else. He thinks he’s kissed another boy—kissed  _ another  _ boy, not just one, which could have been a momentary fluke, but  _ two _ , which means something, probably—but he couldn’t really say, which sounds more concerning than it feels.

“I just… you know how teenagers are,” Gansey offers, sounding not at all like he knows how teenagers are.

“I do know how teenagers are,” Henry says, sounding like he knows very well how teenagers are. “So, Lynch?” He screws up his face more violently than he had when he’d drank that first sip of vodka, sticking out his tongue. “Did he taste like gasoline?”

“Christ, Henry, I’ve never kissed Ronan.” Gansey works very hard to keep his features schooled, a process at which he’s had a wealth of practice.

“Parrish, then. Did  _ he  _ taste like gasoline? What is it with your friends and their car fixations?” Henry wonders.

“He just has a job with cars. Had a job with cars,” Gansey corrects. “Anyway.” He leans back again and is almost grateful to feel his head spinning as he moves. “What about you?” he asks, because he’s always been taught to politely inquire about the other person, even if he doesn’t care about it. He cares about Henry, though. He cares a lot. He lets the hand that’s holding his wrist slip just an inch lower.

“I’m a wild man, Richard.”

“Didn’t you once refer to yourself as Henrysexual?”

Henry winks, except he’s not great at winking, so it comes off as a little more like a blink, and isn’t that just a detriment to his effortless charm, except that it’s not a detriment at all. “There are things not to be said in front of a lady’s delicate ears.”  
“I’m pretty sure that Blue’s ears are far from delicate,” Gansey says. Teases, maybe?

“That’s fair. But no. I’m not confined to myself for that sort of thing,” Henry says, the most awkward way to say  _ I do more than just jack off into my own hand  _ that Gansey’s ever heard.

“Good for you,” Gansey says earnestly, uncomfortably. He grips a little tighter around Henry’s hand, waits for a squeeze back that doesn’t come for a second too long.

“You didn’t answer my question, though,” Henry says playfully. He’s still wearing his Henry-in-public suit. He won’t look Gansey in the eye. “Practice?”

It’s not that Gansey is stupid, and it’s not that Gansey is smart. It’s just that Gansey, no matter how hard he tries to bury it under layers of performativity, is a teenage boy, and maybe he doesn’t really get how teenage boys  _ are  _ supposed to act, but if he’s learned anything from Blue Sargent, it’s that power runs in threes. Gansey has held Adam’s jaw in his hand, and he’s held another boy’s jaw in his hand, probably, though it’s hard to remember, and now he holds Henry’s like he’s afraid it might break.

“Gee. I didn’t think you’d be the type to be able to, you know. Hit it and quit it,” Henry quips. Gansey feels the words in his fingers as they pass Henry’s lips.

“I’ve had a bit to drink,” Gansey says.

“You’re kind of  _ gay _ , Dick,” Henry says.

“I love Blue. I don’t know where to put all the love I have for her.”

“It’s alright to not know,” Henry promises, though Gansey finds that hard to believe. He threads their fingers together fully. It doesn’t feel like Blue. It doesn’t feel any worse, though.

Gansey kisses him and Gansey stays alive and Gansey  _ loves  _ living.

It isn’t like Adam, because he doesn’t feel as guilty, and it isn’t like Blue, because he doesn’t feel on fire. But Henry’s always been different than other people, and Gansey doesn’t know why he thought that kissing him would be at all the same. Kissing Henry is diving deep into a pool, being watched as he swims laps, holding his breath for as long as he can bear just to reassure himself that his lungs can burn with as much of a smoldering ache as anyone else’s.

“I am  _ me _ ,” he breathes into Henry’s mouth, victorious, drunk on something a little more powerful than mid-shelf vodka.

“Whoop whoop,” Henry laughs. He runs a hand through Gansey’s hair, all the way to the top of his head, and pulls him back down.

Gansey loses himself in the flat planes of Henry’s chest beneath him, in the scratch of jeans against his exposed ankle, in the hand pressed against his stomach under the fabric of his Polo shirt. He finds himself wishing the hand to travel higher, willing the hand to travel higher, remembering that words have power and he has his words and he breaks away to say something, but he doesn’t know what he can say without it sounding painfully tacky, because Henry is not Blue and Henry takes everything a little less seriously, or at least he pretends to.

Henry seems to get it, though, because Henry always seems to get it. “All good, Dick? Not having after-the-fact second thoughts? If you are, I’ll stop. You don’t have to worry about thinking about this in the future, about something you don’t want to think about.”

The phrasing is uncharacteristically clunky and wholly unnecessary, because there’s no way that Gansey won’t be thinking about this for years after, and right now he’s thinking that he’s more likely to tell Blue about this tryst than his evening on the lakeside with Adam before he met her. “I think I need to get my mind off of her.”

Henry looks him in the eye then, and there’s an intensity there that burns, a devotion that scares Gansey. “But do you  _ want  _ to, Campell Three.”

He takes a second’s worth of deliberation before nodding a wordless yes and letting Henry flip their positions. Henry kisses down his throat and Gansey thinks of Blue and then thinks that he probably shouldn’t be thinking of Blue and then he thinks about Blue more and then Henry says  _ do you ever shut your brain off  _ and Gansey can’t answer because he feels a thumb stroking the point where his neck meets his jawline and this feels wrong on a lot of different levels but it also feels a little inevitable and Gansey believes in the power of fate. He’s foolhardy like that.

Henry pauses and sits up. He reaches for the hem of his shirt, as if unsure about if he should keep it on or not. Gansey isn’t sure either. He thinks for a moment about how Blue pulls her shirt off from the back collar, tugs it over her head with finality, doesn’t let it turn inside out, drops it on the floor without a second look. He settles on leaving it on.

Gansey wants to kiss him again, feels it like an itch, so he says, “Come here,” and Henry does, because disobeying Gansey is not a thing that anyone really does.

His lips aren’t chapped. Blue’s lips were always chapped. Adam’s lips were chapped. There’s someone else in Gansey’s mind, someone whose lips were very cold, ergo also probably chapped, but that doesn’t very much matter at the moment. Henry is soft and Henry melts into him; Henry fits his cracks and his crevices. Henry is almost a half-foot taller than him and Gansey is very aware of it but doesn’t mind it. It’s easy to forget that Gansey is only five nine. A reminder is nice every once in a while.

Gansey does not open his eyes, mostly because he’s worried that if he does, he’ll end up freaking out. He is very comfortable drifting a few feet away from reality, and he intends to keep it that way for the time being. Cold air hits the places from where Henry’s mouth has just detached, and he shivers, falling into this dream of a circumstance.

Except that this is real life, and real life is not a dream, and he’s hooking up with one of his three other friends to get his mind off of breaking up with his fourth, and Gansey is kind of officially losing his shit at this point, because he  _ loves Blue Sargent _ .

“Hey,” Henry says, stopping. “Hey.”

“Hello,” Gansey says.

“It really  _ isn’t  _ in your vocabulary, is it?”

“Huh?” Gansey blinks rapidly, cooling himself down. 

“The word  _ hey _ . It’s not in your vocabulary.”

“I guess not,” Gansey says. “Are  _ you  _ okay?” He asks it more as a formality than anything, because a polite boy should always inquire about the wellbeing of others.

“You are not the first boy with whom I’ve done this, Dick,” Henry says as an answer, and Gansey is not surprised to learn this fact, and he loves how absolutely unspecial it makes him feel. He’s just like everyone else.

“Oh. You can, you know. Continue.”

“I shouldn’t stay out from home too late,” Henry lies, giving Gansey another option to take an out.

But Gansey has made up his mind, and when Gansey is resolute, he is unchanging.

He leans against the headboard and waits, watching his chest rise and fall as he calms his breath. He’s lucky to be alive. He’s glad to be alive. He is not convincing himself of this—he really isn’t. He finds comfort in facts, sometimes, and it is a fact that he is lucky and he is glad and he can feel the bedframe against his back and it feels like too much but then Henry is pressing a kiss to his cheek and to his lips and it’s just right.

“This is good,” he thinks to himself, and then he pulls back to tell Henry, because truths must be spoken.

“I try,” Henry says through a smirk. 

“Do you want me to—”

“Gansey. Don’t worry about it. For a minute or two, just don’t worry about someone else.”

“Gansey,” Gansey repeats, because that’s not a thing that Henry Cheng calls him, and it feels a little raw against his ears.

Even though he’s doing basically nothing, Gansey still feels like he could be in charge of the situation if he wanted to be, which is a far cry away from any time he was with Blue. He doesn’t know if he likes that, necessarily, but he needs to remind himself that he is alive and that he is still a whole person, unbroken, without any cracks or splinters, so he fists a hand in Henry’s hair and relishes in the fact that he can feel a few strands breaking underneath his fingers. Nomenclature and Blue Sargent’s hair plastered to her forehead drift farther and farther from Gansey’s mind, and so does everything beyond the feeling of Henry’s lips and the sound of his sweet laughter, unmocking, boundless.

Afterwards, post an untangling of hands and holding back the desire to kiss Henry into the mattress until he forgets his name, Gansey says, for the third time this night, “Thank you.”

Though there’s a clear-cut reason the thanks it this time, Henry looks a little surprised. Henry-in-public, finally, is gone. Henry-but-hidden, a boy who feels things just a little too strongly, asks with the utmost sincerity, “What for?”

Gansey is a little too schooled to say  _ a hookup _ , and also that’s not the answer for which he’s looking. He doesn’t really  _ have _ the answer. He smiles softly and says, “I think I’ll be able to get to sleep tonight.”

**Author's Note:**

> the noahgansey stuff was taken from 2 fics by izzylizardborn on ao3 which i just consider canon at this point im begging you all to read them i dont know how to embed links so i'll just copypaste them here: 
> 
> https://archiveofourown.org/works/6821149  
> https://archiveofourown.org/works/7320514
> 
> kudos/comments always appreciated! :) come find me @ commaperson on twitter.


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